This is NOT about the Redskins loss to the Detroit Lions… they did not deserve to win that game… while there were bad calls that influenced the outcome, a good team does not let the game fall into the hands of the officials to begin with.

It’s probably happened for much of the league’s history, but sometime, probably in the early 70’s, the league decided that NFL offenses needed help. Rather than waiting for the coaching form of natural selection to slowly work it’s evolutionary magic, the league decided to ban the bump and run technique that had begun to shut down many NFL passing attacks. They knocked over a domino that began a chain reaction of increasingly complicated and situationally specific rule changes designed to increase scoring by hamstringing defenses.

I think it’s responsible for the incredibly complicated situation that NFL game officials find themselves in today… resulting in incredible inconsistency of officiating, missed calls, bad calls, blown calls… many of which are changing the outcomes of games.

Natural selection works in building coaching philosophies… there is forever a swinging pendulum of offensive dominance, to defensive dominance, and back again… the league erred in attempting to disrupt that swinging pendulum… and made a huge mess of the lot of the NFL Official…

Want to fix it? BACK OFF… make tactics such as bump and run legal again… let the brilliant offensive coaching minds figure out how to beat it…

They figured out how to beat the Tampa 2 without league help…

The NFL needs to simply stop tinkering… let the game be the game. The product that was on NFL fields in 1970 may not have been of the “quality” of the teams taking the fields today… but the game was a whole lot more pure… and officials made fewer mistakes… because their rulebook was simple… clean… uncomplicated.